One of the men who has written of Ephrata before me says: "There is nothing peculiar about the village itself, or its people." He evidently had no "inner sense," and, moreover, he had never been at Whiskey Hill. Not only is the air of Ephrata "salubrious and the outlook delightful," the street is full of gabled houses one close upon the other. Some of them are commonplace indeed; but many of them are quaint and clean, with deep-set windows full of flower-pots, the green foliage shining through latticed panes, in rich contrast to the white snow almost up to the window-sills. And the people one sees--"commonplace"? People who for nearly two hundred years have clung tenaciously to a strange garb, in the midst of a "perverse and crooked generation," bent upon changing the cut of its coats with every passing season? Women who wear brown bonnets and look as modest as thrushes, whom one sees in single file following the men; women who have resisted the allurements of pokes and toques and picture hats for two hundred years--such women commonplace? Such women are as remarkable as they are rare, and such there are in Ephrata. As I watched them they were going to the modest meeting-house at the edge of the village. I did not follow them, for my way led straight down the main street which ends in the turnpike, over which a toll-gate still hangs. The gatekeeper sits in a little hut among his cronies, smoking the native weed and talking politics--and he who is acquainted with the quality of either ought to know that they are strangely alike. "The cloisters are across the meadow," the toll-keeper informed me. And, pointing to one of his companions, a man of uncertain age and a rather doubtful degree of cleanliness, he said: "And he lives in one of them." "I am not a member," the man volunteered, apologetically. "My wife is." This alone proved him a modern and commonplace. I left him disgustedly, and, stepping over the stile, walked through the snow-covered meadow and along the shores of the Cocalico towards a group of rather ill-shaped, weather-beaten buildings which suggested a deserted farm more than a cloister. The momentary disappointment vanishes, however, as soon as one has a clear view of the peaked-roof buildings in which no outer beauty is visible, but which, with their low doors, narrow cells, and roped stairway, recall to him who knows, the "Chronicon Ephratense," the groping of this Brotherhood after the blessed life here below, seeking communion with God in self-denial, in good works and pious songs. These Brothers fell into all the errors of Christendom and practiced many of its virtues in a single generation. Conrad Beisel, a German mystic, came here to live as an anchorite. His pious life drew others to him, and they progressed to monasticism.